Why Hillary Clinton is Doubling Down on Her BlackBerry Picture

Of all the ways in which Hillary Clinton spent the week telling her critics to go to hell, the most direct—even more direct than the defiant press conference where she finally addressed the kerfuffle over her email—is through her Twitter avatar. The picture, of course, shows her checking her BlackBerry, an image that’s morphed suddenly from iconic to ironic.

Earlier this week, Clinton switched her avatar to a silhouette of a woman, explaining that she was doing so to call attention to the issue of gender equality. The move was hailed as shrewd. After all, a picture of Hillary presumably checking messages sends a rather strange signal during an email scandal; changing the avatar too abruptly, on the other hand, could have been seen as an admission she did something wrong. But the campaign for equal pay, as the Washington Post’s Hunter Schwarz noted, provided just the right excuse to swap out the image.

However, the switch was just temporary. A day later, Clinton went back to the BlackBerry photo—an image that has suddenly become a kind political Rorschach test. Will her email scandal be a momentary distraction or a long-term, crippling political problem? In some ways, it depends on which reading of this photo wins out.

Taken in 2011, the striking black-and-white picture was snapped by Time photographer Diana Walker, while Clinton was flying aboard a military cargo plane from Malta to Tripoli. The moment was rather inauspicious. "We’d gotten on the C-17 and [Clinton’s communications advisor] Philippe Reines came over and said to me and the other photographer on the trip, ’Would you like to come up to the front of the airplane before we take off to take a picture of the Secretary?’" Walker recalled for me this week. "She was reaching into her pocket book when we got there and she brought out her glasses, which turned out to be her dark glasses—they were the nearest pair she could find, I guess—and she lifted up her BlackBerry and she started reading it. We took a few frames, we said ’thank you very much,’ and we went back to the back of the plane and sat back down. It was very simple. It was a couple of minutes."

A week later, the picture ran in Time. Sunglassed and stern-lipped, Clinton appeared to her supporters as a globetrotting badass in the image, a steely diplomat solving the world’s problems with a certain swagger.

Indeed, when the image—along with another color photo by Reuters photographer Kevin Lamarque—became the basis for an Internet meme, "Texts from Hillary," Clinton and her staff quickly embraced the notoriety and even invited the photographers to the State Department. "The Secretary seemed to have thought it was funny," Walker says, "and all the reaction to it around the world was she looked cool." When Clinton left Foggy Bottom in 2013, she chose the photo as her Twitter avatar.

And why not? Referencing her Internet popularity signaled a winking self-awareness—always a good thing for a politician to do, especially on Twitter. But the avatar accomplished more than that. The photo pointed to what will serve as a cornerstone of Clinton’s 2016 campaign: her State Department years, during which she transformed herself from the haughty, bumbling presidential candidate of 2008 into the hyper-competent, take-no-prisoners political ninja who was capably running the world. In a way, the picture managed to capture everything that accounted for Clinton’s impressive favorability rating when she left the State Department in 2013.

But now, of course, that photo has a very different connotation, and it furnishes Republicans with the ammunition they need to engage in Karl Rove’s favorite tactic of attacking an opponent’s strength. Although there’s plenty of policy grist for Republicans to use in criticizing Hillary’s State Department record—on everything from her Russia "reset" to her support for America’s calamitous Libya intervention—nothing is more politically potent suddenly than the "Texts from Hillary" photo. The very thing that made the image go viral—Clinton’s reputation for control and ruthlessness—now drives the email scandal. How can anyone believe that this woman who was running the world set up a private email system because she couldn’t handle using two smartphones? Surely there’s a more sinister explanation—and it’s not hard to envision how Clinton’s opponents will use the photo. They already are. Trey Gowdy, the South Carolina Republican heading up the House of Representatives Benghazi investigation, has taken to pointing out that Clinton has failed to turn over to his committee any emails she wrote on the day the photo was taken. "It strains credibility to believe that if you’re on your way to Libya to discuss Libyan policy that there’s not a single document that’s been turned over to Congress," he said on Sunday.

Seeing her image co-opted by Clinton’s critics horrifies Walker. "When I was photographing Secretary Clinton in that situation, she was reading her emails," Walker says, noting that she never saw Clinton writing messages, as Gowdy seems to want people to believe. "I was there for about two or three minutes and she was reading. If the congressman knows she was actually using her hands to write an email, I didn’t see it. I saw her reading an email."

Of course, the image’s power has always come more from what it suggests than from what it shows (reading emails is, after all, a patently pedestrian activity). So, is Clinton a battle-tested leader, ready to become Commander in Chief? Or is she a shady bureaucrat with a bunch of secrets to hide? For now, at least, Clinton seems to be betting there’s more to be gained in voters imaging the former, than foes suspecting the latter.